Holy Saturday

I hope you are having a mindful and grace-filled Holy Week...

I wanted to share just a few things I've been meditating on--especially during the dark in-between-ness of Christ Crucified and Christ Resurrected.

I love what Micah J. Murray has written here on Good Friday.  In this prose-poem, "God is Dead," he explores the decimating reality of when God was dead.  The women and the Beloved Disciple at the cross must have held hope till the very last that He who could heal and He who could command the seas could and would rescue himself.  But no.  "It is finished" was the crushing blow to such hopes.  Murray writes:

Of course the earth shook when the breath that had formed mankind slipped from the lungs of the very One who first spoke it all into existence. I wonder that mountains and oceans and planets and stars didn’t all plummet together into an infinite void of darkness, when the hands that had molded them fell limp and lifeless, pierced and broken. 

“God is dead...”

And on this day, we don't get to rush ahead to the happy ending.  On this day we identify with the finality of hope lost.  And in this moment, I understand the words that my soul so often pushes against when TS Eliot said:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

- East Coker  

In so doing, we empathize with those who have lost hope in their own lives.  At the beginning of Lent, I read this beautiful reflection by Josh Ross who pointed out that, this year, Holy Saturday falls on the same day as the anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.  As he so wonderfully puts it:

I think—as for now—April 4th belongs on the Saturday after Good Friday and before Easter Sunday. It is the day that adequately describes where we are in race relations today throughout our world...
Saturday is where we often live. It is the day of questioning, doubt, anxiety, and confusion. There is an awkwardness about Saturday; an uncertainty of how exactly this story is going to pan out.
Race in America is not where it was. Yet, it also isn’t where it needs to be. We can’t go back to the days of utter darkness, despair, oppression, and striping certain groups of dignity, yet we also can’t pretend as if we have arrived at somewhere we have not.

Holy Saturday reminds us that far too many areas of our world have yet to experience Resurrection.

And yet, today I have been reading Lady Julian of Norwich and exploring the notion of felix culpa--literally "happy fall." St. Augustine said of this notion: "Melius enim iudicavit de malis benefacere quam mala nulla esse permittere."  Or, in English, "For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist."

Holy Saturday means Christ is in the tomb and hope seems vain, "but all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well..."

"I'm having an emotional response to art!  
Is that normal?"

- Tom Haverford 

"Just work"

This is a follow up to last night's post.  I'm assigning my students some videos on Brandon Stanton (the man behind HONY).  In the process of research, I came across this interview:

"Just work! You know, don't wait! Everybody's waiting till they have the perfect idea to start working... Even if you have an inkling of what you want to do, start moving towards it and it's going to flesh itself out through the process of moving towards the goal and by the time you get to where you're gonna be, it's not gonna look anything like it did when you sat on the couch thinking about it. And if you wait until it's perfect in your head till you get off the couch and start working on it, that's never going to happen." 

- Brandon Stanton

I can't get this out of my head or my heart...

Excerpts from TS Eliot's "Four Quartets" [Part III]

"Little Gidding"

 

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic…

In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant.

You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
     We only live, only suspire
     Consumed by either fire or fire.

For last year's words belong to last year's language 
And next year's words await another voice.

[via]

 

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.

Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

[via]

Excerpts from TS Eliot's "Four Quartets" [Part II]

"The Dry Salvages"

The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint--
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled...

Excerpts from TS Eliot's "Four Quartets" [Part I]

"Burnt Norton"

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind 
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious in not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden...
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness...

"East Coker"

...Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter...
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion...

Meditating

I've been meditating on these words and images from the Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011).  Enjoy.



The nuns taught us there are two ways through life...
The way of Nature
And the way of Grace. 
You have to choose which one you'll follow.

Grace doesn't try to please itself. 
Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. 
Accepts insults and injuries.
 
Nature only wants to please itself. 
Get others to please it too. 
Likes to lord it over them. 
To have its own way. 

It finds reasons to be unhappy--
When all the world is shining around it,
When love is smiling through all things.
They taught us that no one who loves the way of grace
Ever comes to a bad end.

Lord, why? Where were you?

Did you know what happened? 

Do you care? 

Help each other. 

Love everyone. 

Every leaf. 

Every ray of light. 

Forgive. 

The only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love, your life will flash by.

Clips: The Way of Nature & the Way of Grace  and the incredible Creation Sequence.